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Very cool introductory article! Game hacking techniques have gotten even more advanced and cat-and-mouse than this in recent years, though. My brother is reall

Very cool introductory article! Game hacking techniques have gotten even more advanced and cat-and-mouse than this in recent years, though. My brother is really into this stuff and I hear a lot from him. For example, nowadays anti cheats like Unreal's EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) ban the use of certain drivers because people are relying on e.g. vulnerable Intel wifi chipset drivers in Windows in order to have a way to get into the kernel's memory space to modify game memory without the anti-cheat knowing[0] (after all, it's your wifi driver not your own arbitrary kernel module!) - so people are constantly finding vulnerable drivers that anti-cheats don't know about. Also heard rumors that the Windows kernel actually has undocumented anti-cheat hooks directly in it these days so that anti-cheat engines can plug into, as part of the Windows store initiative. Interesting stuff. [0] https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/343907-tutorial-kdmapper-manual-map-driver-using-vulnerable-driver-intel.html https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/343907-...

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I wonder if the demand for DRM that actually works will eventually split Linux distros into ones that respect user freedom, and SteamOS, which will be able to run Steam. I thought I read discussion of their proposed anti-cheat kernel module already... can't have nice things with any shared resource...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  No doubt. It's impossible to enforce copyright if users are free. Same thing applies to cheats. It's impossible to prevent cheating if users are free. Truth be told, cheating is nothing but an exercise in computing freedom: the user orders the computer to cheat and the computer obeys. Linux users of Steam and its games will eventually be forced to install proprietary kernel modules. They'll have to swallow that if they want to play the games they paid money for. Steam machines will probably be reduced to appliances just like game consoles eventually. The whole point is to enable the game companies to own the user's machines. They don't think users should have total freedom and the only way to enforce that is to take it away.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago

I wonder if the demand for DRM that actually works will eventually split Linux distros into ones that respect user freedom, and SteamOS, which will be able to run Steam. I thought I read discussion of their proposed anti-cheat kernel module already... can't have nice things with any shared resource...

matheusmoreira 5y ago
No doubt. It's impossible to enforce copyright if users are free. Same thing applies to cheats. It's impossible to prevent cheating if users are free. Truth be told, cheating is nothing but an exercise in computing freedom: the user orders the computer to cheat and the computer obeys. Linux users of Steam and its games will eventually be forced to install proprietary kernel modules. They'll have to swallow that if they want to play the games they paid money for. Steam machines will probably be reduced to appliances just like game consoles eventually. The whole point is to enable the game companies to own the user's machines. They don't think users should have total freedom and the only way to enforce that is to take it away.